Tuesday, January 25, 2011

New Threads, DCUO Style

...or why this game needs RP servers, pronto.

One of the things which you do as a sideline to all of the other cool stuff in DCUO, is collect costumes. This might seem quite a strange thing, especially coming from a game like WoW where the functionality of the armour is far more important than the look, but for a superhero game, the look is paramount! The ability within DCUO to lock your look means that you can perfect it and keep it, whilst increasing your power through loot 'underneath the hood' (quite literally in some cases). To encourage you to complete these sets, successfully gathering the costumes delivers a feat and feats mean extra skill points. However, to me, the joy is being able to perfect your image. With this in mind, I present Pele at level 25

Not a huge number of differences, but to me, they are noticeable. Firstly I've added some cool goggle things for a slightly more futuristic look. These have also been accompanied by new shoulder and hand pieces (from the New Genesis set) and a belt (from the Fourth World set.) Her 'simple blades' have been replaced by 'Techno-Katanas' as well. The changes are subtle, but they add to the character overall. Now, of course some of the sets are so outlandish that you can rarely use the pieces, but I have managed to collect two of the sets and now I can present them here, in all their glory.

This is the Demonic suit (coloured to the red, white and orange of my original costume.) Its a particularly spikey affair and looks wholly impractical but it offers the perfect possibility for your character to be possessed by some sort of entity and transformed into something from beyond that man should never know.

This rather funky get-up is the 'Shielded Robot' set - a full-on elegant manga armour set with big hands and feet, smooth helment and spikey exhaust jets out of the back. Now any self-respecting Iron Man fan will be able to tell you that Shellhead has a set of armour for all weathers and this could easily be the 'edge of the atmosphere/close orbit' sort of space armour, or even stuff for underwater!

So many possibilities, so little RP in the game. It could be so much more.